Sunday, 12 August 2012

The School Shakespeare Newspaper / Activities

In recent years we have moved a long way from teacher-led Practical Criticism Q&A. As learners we are always searching for fun ways to explore texts. Experience demonstrates that allowing children to be creative is an excellent way to build critical engagement. Fun means deeper learning, and in my view, play cultivates questions.

So let's have the courage to allow our students to play with plots and create their own interpretations of them. This approach need not displace traditional literary/critical writing exercises. Rather, it serves as a way of incubating enjoyable and engaging point(s) of entry to the text.

How does this approach work? I'm not going to write up a detailed lesson plan, but you will find a short case study below. The newspaper model can be adapted to any text. (I recently worked with this approach using Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.)

The project briefly sketched below will also help the learners to be
more aware of style, tone, and the target readership. These are key
skills and competences for any professional writer. And for the GCSE Exam.

Project Summary

I was asked recently how one might develop a school newspaper based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Skills involved

The task outlined employs writing and literacy, ICT, visual analysis, and both individual research and collaborative team work.

Allow plenty of time to research the stories, to design the newspaper and to master all the technical skills. It's also an excellent way to examine professional roles and expectations, and to engage in practical group work.

Knowledge

Essentially, the key to any news story is answering these questions:

Who? What? Where? When? How? Why?

Opportunities

Creatively, maybe you could attempt one or more of these 'treatments' as a part of your newspaper

(1) write in the style of a celebrity gossip column and fill in the characters' background, hobbies and status

(2) provide a map of the happenings, or photo of the forest, and other key locations

(5) parents' perspectives on their missing children with quotes from them

(6) have a legal expert explaining that those who disobey their parents will be put to death

(7) employ an astrologer to predict what will happen next

(8) record the views of trained psychologist

(9) print a statement from the police

Try to use different writing styles for each of these in order to gain a top class mark. You could also record short video clips, inlcudingh the latest news and interviews. Let me know how you get on!

Further Information on the author of this blog

Ian McCormick is the author of The Art of Connection: the Social Life of Sentences
(Quibble Academic, 2013) Also available on Kindle, or to download. Ian's most recent publications include
chapters on romanticism and gothic in The English Literature Companion, edited
by Julian Wolfreys (Palgrave Student Companions 2011). 'Teaching and Learning Strategies'
which featured inThe Eighteenth-Century Literature Handbook, edited
by Gary Day and Bridget Keegan (Continuum, 2009) is available for free online
(download the pdf) but you will need to complete a very starightforward and short registration.Ian's book on Shakespearean Tragedy will be published in December 2014.A chapter on
Sex and Death in the Eighteenth Century was published by Routledge
in May 2013. Ian is currently working on a book about the grotesque in the eighteenth
century, based on his doctoral thesis. Another related project will consider the treatment of cancer in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.